A customs declaration must be submitted in two cases:

1. The goods have been ordered from a EU country, but the country of origin of the goods is outside of the EU, such as China, the United States, Taiwan, Singapore, the United Kingdom, etc.

Online stores often fail to provide this information to the buyer and the person ordering the goods may mistakenly assume that the goods will arrive from the EU and will not be taxable.

2. Another reason is the so-called transit of goods, in the case of which the manufacturers dispatch your shipment as goods which will pass through a postal undertaking of a EU country in the form of transit. In this case, the tracking numbers of the shipment include the mark of the respective EU country (the amount of the shipments transiting through Latvia, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany is especially high), misleadingly creating an impression as if the goods arrived from this country. In actual fact, the goods originate from outside of the EU, were not subjected to customs operations in the country of entry into the EU (the transit country), and the shipment must therefore be declared and taxed in the destination country – in this case, in Estonia.

Such shipments are marked with a yellow sticker by the postal undertaking of the transit country, which shows to the postal undertaking of the destination country that the shipment does not have the status of intra-EU goods and must undergo customs operations.